Traditional Chinese medicine
(also known as TCM, Simplified Chinese: 中医学; Traditional Chinese: 中醫學; pinyin: Zhōngyī xué) is a range of traditional medical practices originating in China that developed over several thousand years. These practices include theories, diagnosis and treatments such as herbal medicine, acupuncture and massage; often Qigong is also strongly affiliated with TCM.

TCM is a form of Oriental medicine, which includes other traditional East Asian medical systems such as traditional Japanese, and Korean medicine.

Kampō (or kanpō, kampoo, kanpoo 漢方)
medicine is the Japanese study and adaptation of Traditional Chinese medicine. The basic works of Chinese medicine came to Japan between the 7th and 9th centuries. Since then, the Japanese have created their own unique herbal medical system and diagnosis. Kampo utilizes most of the Chinese medical system including acupuncture and moxibustion, but is primarily concerned with the study of herbs.

This special medicine is used in summer to prevent overheating of the body and also against summer diarrhea and skin rashes. It is carminative and astringent.
It is a pulver made of the dried leaves and stems of a plant from the Shiso family, naginata kooju ナギナタコウジュ, 長刀香需, Elsholtzia ciliata.

"seller of deer horn", roku uri 鹿売（ろくうり）
"food for the cold season" kangui 寒喰（かんぐい）
Special food that was known for its medical properties was eaten in winter. Friends would gather for example around a hodgepot of bear liver (and lots of rice wine), to try and keep healthy.

The actual day nowadays has been placed as May 5. This has been decided by the Associaton of Selling Medicine in 1987. So the mention of the exact day is a kigo for early summer.
The medicine of old, which has been freshly picked since early summer, had started selling a bit later. A special day, KUSURIBI 薬日, had already been fixed by Suiko Tenno as early as 611.

In summer, it is the time to pick the leaves and blossoms for medicine, in autumn, as seen below, is the time to dig for the roots.

kusudama 薬玉 (くすだま) "medicine ball"
choomeiru, choomei ru 長命縷（ちょうめいる）/ 続命縷（しょくめいる）
"threads of long life"
fragrance balls with different smells and threads of five different colors at the bottom. They are hung on the wall and protect from evil influences, especially on May 5, the Boy's Festival.. . . CLICK here for Photos !

According to the Asian Lunar Calender, when it rained on May 5, the water would collect in the bamboo joints. This was thought to be of special properties to ward off illness during the coming summer.May 5, the Boy's Festival

They walked in Edo and other towns from the beginning of summer till the 8th lunar month.
The drink contained a brew of loquat leaves, dried salted plums (bainiku), licorice (kanzoo) and mokkoo 木香 Saussurea family plant.
This brew was used for all kinds of ailments on the great heat, including diarrhea and cholera.
The origin of this medicine was in Kyoto. In Edo it was sold by the store of Yamaguchiya 山口家. In Edo they often stood on bridges to sell their ware. They carried two boxes on a shoulder pole, one with tools to make hot water and prepare the brew. In the first few days they even gave away the drink for free.
The name "biwa yootoo" was also used for women who were willing to give in to the wishes of men . . . since it was sold free on bridges.

joosai uri, joosai-uri 定斎売 (じょうさいうり) vendor of Josai medicine
joosaiya, joosai-ya 定斎屋（じょうさいや）
During the Momoyama period, the owner of a medicine shop in Osaka, Murata Joosai, prepared this medicine according to Chinese tradition. It is supposed to help with all sorts of summer ailments. The vendors did not wear a straw hat in summer, since they were supposed to take this medicine and thus never become ill, even in the strongest heat wave.

The vendors kept the medicine in two wooden boxes, carried on a shoulder pole (tenbin) and call out loud for the medicine, which was already popular in the times of Toyotomi Hideyoshi.
The boxes had some metal fittings at the bottom drawers which produced a noisy sound too, kattan kattan カッタンカッタン to promote their trade.
When the folks of Edo heared that rattling noise, they knew it was a hot day ahead.

This purely Japanese household medicine is especially used in Western Japan.

It is made by boiling the bark of the Chinese cork tree (kihada キハダ, Phellodendron amurense) for a while. It has an antibacterial effect in the digestive tract, especially the colon and was used for dysentery, cholera infections and against staphylococcus. It is a well-known cure for stomach complaints. Nowadays you can buy it in the Ominesan holy mountain area, where it has been handed down since the time of En no Gyoja. The medicine had been handed down amongst the mountain ascetics who helped spread it in all of Japan.

The ninja used this medicine in a slightly unusual way; a quick lick after days on a mission would make the ninja feel fully refreshed.

Toyama in the old Echigo province was famous for the medicine production before the modern area.
A lot of their medicine packs had a face of Daruma on it for good luck too.
Their sellers used to walk from home to home with their large backpacks and exchange the old unused medicine from last year to the new one. Most households kept a box with medicine for daily ailments. Toyama no kusuri uri, the medicine sellers, would keep their customers through many generations.

Lately, the medicine with Daruma has been revived and I have quite a few in my Daruma Museum.

dokukeshi uri 毒消売 (どくけしうり) vendors of antidote
dokukeshi 毒消（どくけし） antidote
For the many illnesses that occured in former times during summer, like food poisoning and upset stomach.
The medicine was made in Toyama and two girls in ikat kimono would walk together to sell it. Their loud voices calling out the merchandise were wellcomed by the villagers. Now these vendors have become obsolete.
越後毒消し売り

Long ago in Japan, human illness was commonly believed to be the work of tiny malevolent creatures inside the body. Harikikigaki 針聞書（はりききがき）, a book of medical knowledge written in 1568 by a now-unknown resident of Osaka, introduces 63 of these creepy-crawlies and describes how to fight them with acupuncture and herbal remedies. The Kyushu National Museum, which owns the original copy of Harikikgaki, claims the book played an important role in spreading traditional Chinese medicine in Japan.

In ancient times illness was thought to be due to something entering the body, and recovery meant ridding oneself of this contamination. Shamans, usually female, were employed to drive away this evil spirit.

The original function of the shaman was not just to drive evil spirits from the body, but to charm away all the spirits that bring unhappiness. The shaman also performed rites invoking the gods' blessings for good fortune, the birth of a male child or a good harvest, etc.

To cure the sick, the shaman made offerings of food and wine, and sometimes even sacrifices of animals, symbolizing the ill person. In return for the offerings, the shaman would request the spirits to leave the body and home of the sick person and never return. Making the entreaty, the shaman would sing, chant, dance and pray.

If this was not effective, a more active and hostile approach was made. The locality of the spirits would be sought out and if found, beaten, shut up in a bottle, floated down the river, buried in the ground or wounded with a sharp knife or stick through a performance that symbolized these actions.

These performances, lasting anywhere from an hour to a week, were accompanied by music.

Fortunetellers were often consulted in the treatment of illness. Through divination, it was believed they could determine the causes of the sickness and advise an appropriate treatment.

Not only illness, but also misfortune, and calamities of various kinds, were attributed to evil spirits. To protect against these forces, Koreans would often post pujok, or talismans, at certain places in and around the house such as the gate, the ceiling beam, over the door, and in the barn.

Most talismans were painted in red ink on yellow or white mulberry paper. Red has traditionally been thought to possess the power to suppress evil, and for this reason, red beans, red clay, red gowns and other red items are often used in shamanistic rites.

Korean talismans range in style from highly structured, geometric patterns to free-form swirls and doodles. Some consist of a single Chinese ideograph and others incorporate lines of Chinese or Sanskrit into a maze of effigies, figures, star charts and religious symbols.

Used not only for exorcising evil spirits, some talismans were also seen as assisting those in need of special help.

The employment of such talismans is an involved process requiring rites of purification, performing chants, painting the talisman, and posting it in the appropriate place. At the beginning of the lunar year, Buddhist monks often prepare talismans and send them to their followers for posting.

The beginning of springtime is an important season and, by custom, families usually post a talisman in the hope that spring will bring happiness and harmony to the family.

Information provided by the Korean Embassyhttp://www.asianinfo.org/asianinfo/korea/cel/folk_medicine.htm

Kihada is native to Japan, where it grows wild in the mountains. A deciduous tree growing up to fifteen meters, it has outer bark of a cork or buff color. In Japanese, Ki means yellow and hada means skin, which indicates one of the interesting features of the tree. If you peel the buff outer bark, a bright yellow inner cortex is revealed. It is this inner cortex that is used for medicinal purposes.

Traditionally, this inner bark is harvested in summer. Contemporary research has proven the wisdom of this process. At that time of the year, the bark's most active constituent, berberine, is in its highest concentration. Once again, science has established that the ancients really knew what they were doing!

One very unique and interesting use of this plant has to do with record keeping. Kihada bark is used as source of yellow color dye - with an added feature. It repels insects. As a result, people used Kihada bark to dye important papers - birth, marriage, death certificates and the like! Papers you would not want eaten by insects.

Kihada is one of the most important plants in Japanese folk medicine, so important, it is registered in the Japanese Medicines Codex, an honor awarded very few herbs !

Legend goes that a famous Japanese Buddhist monk, Kukai, went to China and brought back a formula for a powerfully healing concoction. The concoction was called Daranisuke.

The monk brought this prescription back to Japan early in the ninth century AD. The prescription was very simple in composition. Kihada cortex plus two other herbs, the root of Gentiana scabra and the leaves of Aucuba japonica.

Like Kihada, Gentiana scabra is a digestive bitter. Aucuba japonica is a demulcent which adds viscosity to the mixture. The three herbs are decocted several times until a thick fluid extract is produced. This fluid extract is then dried until a solid extract results. The extract is extremely bitter which makes it, amongst other things, an excellent digestive tonic! Bitters increase the digestive tract's production of essential digestive enzymes.

So bitter was this herbal extract, monks used it for an amusing and practical purpose. Monks would take a small amount in their mouth to wake themselves up when they found themselves falling asleep while studying. History reveals that as monks spread the word of Buddha, they also spread the word of Daranisuke and Kihada.

Since then Daranisuke has become a household remedy, with many traditional uses to back it up. It is a digestive tonic used in stomachache, gastroenteritis, jaundice, diarrhea, food poisoning, hangovers, nausea and indigestion. It is also used to treat boils, ulcers, conjunctivitis, cystitis, dermatitis, dysentery, eczema, enteritis, meningitis, acute conjunctivitis, fever, flux, gonorrhea, leucorrhea, melaena, rheumatism, stomatitis, urethritis, vaginitis, and worms!

If one were to summarize Kihada's use, it could be seen as a healing agent for the skin and mucous membranes. It is used internally and applied externally for all chronic skin conditions. The mucous membrane lines the digestive, reproductive, urinary, and respiratory tract and many of the problems affecting those systems are rooted in mucous membrane malfunction. For mucous membrane disease, Kihada is used internally.

The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements – August 11, 2015by Erik J. Hammerstrom (Author) .Kexue, or science, captured the Chinese imagination in the early twentieth century, promising new knowledge about the world and a dynamic path to prosperity. Chinese Buddhists embraced scientific language and ideas to carve out a place for their religion within a rapidly modernizing society.

Examining dozens of previously unstudied writings from the Chinese Buddhist press, this book maps Buddhists' efforts to rethink their traditions through science in the initial decades of the twentieth century. Buddhists believed science offered an exciting, alternative route to knowledge grounded in empirical thought, much like their own. They encouraged young scholars to study subatomic and relativistic physics while still maintaining Buddhism's vital illumination of human nature and its crucial support of an ethical system rooted in radical egalitarianism. Showcasing the rich and progressive steps Chinese religious scholars took in adapting to science's rising authority, this volume offers a key perspective on how a major Eastern power transitioned to modernity in the twentieth century and how its intellectuals anticipated many of the ideas debated by scholars of science and Buddhism today..more at amazon com.

The Nobel Prize versus traditional Chinese medicineby Orac on October 12, 2015.Last week, in response to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Chinese scientist Youyou Tu, who isolated Artemisinin and validated it as a useful treatment for malaria back in the 1970s, I pointed out that the discovery was a triumph of natural products pharmacology, not of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). So did Scott Gavura, a pharmacist who blogs at my favorite other blog, Science-Based Medicine, who also emphasized that the path from TCM remedy for fever to pill used to treat malaria was the very model of how pharmacologists isolate medicines from plants. Basically, we both noted that Artemisinin is extracted from wormwood, but that the process of turning it into a drug involved a lot of trial and error, the elucidation of which wormwood plants contained enough Artemisinin to be useful for manufacturing larges amounts of it, and chemical modification fo the compound to make it more potent. None of this had anything to do with the basic ideas at the heart of TCM, such as the five elements or the imbalances in heat, damp, and the like to which TCM ascribes the cause of all diseases..Read onhttp://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/10/12/the-nobel-prize-versus-traditional-chinese-medicine/.

Woodblocks associated with Japanese medicine, healing: There is an amazing resource online at the University of California. Their entire woodblock is related to medicine and health, and most of it is online and well-documented. http://japanesewoodblockprints.library.ucsf.edu/http://japanesewoodblockprints.library.ucsf.edu/about.html.